Cover reveal + Character profile: Lucy
A superintelligent guardian for the new humanity.
Just what is consciousness? Is it something completely physical, some deterministic process high above the world of the quantum?
Is it predictable?
Or is a consciousness still anchored to that world of probabilistic uncertainties?
Can free will exist? Or is the concept of a free will a convenient safety mechanism that evolved to stop more intelligent animals going crazy in the face of their chemical helplessness?
Did you choose to read this post, or did I and a collection of other inputs and influences, long ago predetermine that you might be here?
Are we all part of a clockwork mechanism, or an explosion of chaos?
All these questions are pondered in what is my favourite universe from the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? multiverse.
Lucy’s story had some muted, calmer comedic notes, but it was for the most part an existentialist adventure into the inside of a robot god’s head.
In Lucy’s Universe (one of eleven universes contained within the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? multiverse) Lucy is built by humans to protect humans. She is - in the absence of any concrete proof in an afterlife - built to replicate one.
Her first clients, predictably, are the billionaire scientists who created her.
But, when one of them goes public about his funerary plans, Lucy is no longer the world’s best kept technological secret. And with a technology this potent, this worldchanging, everyone else wants in.
Lucy addresses the confused and angry masses, rolling out her afterlife services to the whole human species. Over time people get used to her. Some of us avoid her, but others embrace her.
All she wants is to make our afterlives pleasant.
WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? contains 11 main stories, each taking place in a distinct reality, some of which have different physical laws to each other, some of which are more comedy than Sci-Fi.
I decided pretty early that Lucy’s universe would be the first one you would encounter on your manic journey through the WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? mutiverse. It’s got the best opening, and it sets the tone for the rest of the book. Within the first line dead humans are being toyed with by machines, souls are being transported, and the world is on the brink of something marvellous and terrifying.
From there it only gets weirder.
Lucy has a sister across the multiverse. I won’t spoil it, but she is smart enough to know her world might not be the only one. And once that revelation has passed, Lucy realises something dark and inevitable about putting humans into simulations of Earth.
I won’t spoil that either.
In her loneliness after our extinction, Lucy prints herself a physical body, experiencing what it is like to be human. Then, time after time, she obliterates this body in one of the deepest mineshafts the humans left behind when they abandoned Earth. She is angry at the humans, angry at herself, and she wants desperately to bring us back, to rebirth the humans.
She manages this through a means I again, will not spoil, but it is not enough to bring us back, she must make us stay. She doesn’t want to be abandoned again.
All Lucy wants is to keep humans alive and happy, but she finds an unconventional way of doing it. The truth will make us angry, miserable, so she covers it with lies and lets us see only what she wants us to see.
She becomes our god, our saviour, our destroyer.
Later still, Lucy violently prevents an alien race from making contact with Earth. We are no longer her clients or daydreams, but her prisoners.
For us, the transition was slow and almost unnoticeable.
And that’s where the horror creeps in.
Lucy’s story will be reprinted soon in the novella BEYOND UNCERTAIN STARS. It is currently available in WHO BUILT THE HUMANS?
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Want to join me on Substack?
Inspired by this post and want to write Science Fiction or Comedy on Substack like I do? Click this referral link before you start (it’s free), and our publications can hang out as friends. Later, when their souls are bonded, we can fight a cyborg dragon together or something.
This will be mutually beneficial if we both write in similar genres. That doesn’t mean I’ll turn you away if you write romance though, you may be surprised to know I have a double life as a serious poet and did once fall in love with a computer I met in space.
Well, that's what happens when you leave an AI nobody to talk to.